A public appeal was launched today to raise £3.3m in three months to buy the Staffordshire hoard, one of the most jaw-dropping of archeological finds or, as the historian David Starkey called it, 5.5 kilos of Anglo-Saxon "gangland bling".

Politicians and archaeologists joined Starkey in Birmingham to launch a ­campaign to raise the money and keep the hoard, the largest and most significant find of Anglo-Saxon gold, in the Midlands. Failure to raise the money was almost unthinkable, said Starkey.

"It won't go abroad because an export bar would be put on it, but the worst case scenario is that it might be sold on the open market and split up and that can't be allowed to happen. It is not just the quantity of the find that is remarkable, it is the quality and it is the story that it tells."

Starkey conceded times were hard but said the big queues to see objects from the hoard heartened him. "It underscores what I always say, which is that history is not just about reason and logic, which is what you get with the school curriculum, it is about story and myth and emotion. This hoard has got all of those things."

It is six months since metal detectorist Terry Herbert made the discovery on a field near Lichfield, Staffordshire. Within five days he had 244 bags of objects. By the end of the excavation some 1,800 items, including 712 made of gold and 707 of silver, had been discovered after being buried for 1,300 years.

"This is entirely male gangland bling," said Starkey. "This is the Rolex watch and gold chains of a gang leader."

Archaeologists have been studying the artefacts. Kevin Leahy, an expert on Anglo-Saxon metalwork, has been examining images including creatures with the bodies of men and heads of wolves. He believes they are not mythical creatures but depictions of men wearing wolfskin masks and pelts: berserkers, an elite squad attached to Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon lords. Other previously unpublished images from the hoard, also on foil fragments, show figures remarkably like modern comic book images of Martians – they are in fact protecting their heads with small round shields.

The hoard was valued at £3.3m last November and that money will be shared by Herbert and the farmer who owns the field. Today the Art Fund charity pledged £300,000 to the campaign, and Birmingham and Stoke- on-Trent city councils have also pledged £100,000 each. If secured, the hoard will go on display at Birmingham museum and art gallery and the Potteries museum and art gallery in Stoke.

Culture minister Margaret Hodge said: "I know how much the hoard has captured the imaginations of local people, and so I am confident we'll make it. The hoard is incredibly significant to the understanding of our Saxon heritage and it is only right that it should be kept and displayed in the west Midlands for future generations to enjoy."